One great fear of legalized marijuana was the spectre of more cannabis-impaired workers on the job and drivers on the road, but cracking down on this may soon be as fast and easy as having a suspect stare at an eye scan app on a cell phone.

An Edmonton company, SafetyScan Technologies, is marketing and developing a new way to check people for heavy fatigue or marijuana and alcohol impairment.

The company’s current desktop unit scans eye movement, the measurements showing if a worker is impaired, screening out workers who aren’t fit for duty.

Such technology might conjure up dark imaginings of Blade Runner eye scans, as well as concerns around intrusions into privacy, but the tech wins praise from both employers and workers’ groups.

Drugs and alcohol abuse leads to firings, decreased productivity, occupational injuries and fatalities, says Arlene Dunn, deputy director of Canada’s Building Trades Unions. Fatigue is also an issue, with injury and accident rates 30 per cent higher on night shifts. But the key in all this is actually measuring fitness for duty. “To this end and, with the health, safety and well-being of all workers in mind, some form of cognitive impairment testing would be extremely useful in making a real-time fitness assessment.”

Edmonton businessman Randal Roberts saw the opportunity for the eye scan machine about seven years ago, but things took off after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals took power in 2015 with promises to legalize marijuana.

Until that time, it had been enough for companies to ban a worker from a job site if they had trace amounts of marijuana in their system, as any use was illegal. With the drug now legal, and with trace amounts sticking around for many days after usage, Roberts realized the old testing regimen of peeing in a bottle wasn’t going to cut it. It would merely show that a worker had used a legal substance, not that they were impaired. “It’s a flawed way to test,” he says.

The scanner tech, developed more than a decade ago in the United States, checks for something known as “horizontal gaze nystagmus,” the involuntary movement of your eyes.

When you look into the scanner, you’re asked to track a moving light. If you’re impaired on alcohol, your eyes won’t track the light smoothly, but move in jerky fashion. On marijuana, the pupil pulses, getting bigger and smaller. The machine also can pick up on fatigue, Roberts says.

“It could be cognitive fatigue, which is not, ‘I’m tired.’ It’s more like, ‘I have not slept for two weeks’ kind of fatigue. It needs to be multiple days of not sleeping or getting very little sleep.”

Roberts is working on next-generation equipment with the University of Alberta artificial intelligence scientists and the Alberta Centre for Advanced MNT Products. The idea is to come up with much more portable scanner.

“Potentially, at some point, this could be my scanner,” Roberts says, holding up his cell phone. “It will be cheaper, faster, more portable.”

For now Roberts is marketing the desktop equipment and he’s got a highly satisfied customer in Lorne Schnell, President of Morsky Industrial Services.

It has been using the scanner for three weeks at one Morsky job where workers operate heavy duty equipment.

Each worker takes the 30-second test each morning. So far no one has failed.

Schnell is glad to have this new test for drugs and alcohol, but before SafetyScan there was no great way to test for fatigue. “Fatigue is far worse than drugs and alcohol put together,” he says. “(SafetyScan) doesn’t care why our guys might be impaired, it’s just: Are they or aren’t they fit for duty? And that’s a big deal for us.”

The idea isn’t to punish workers, but to keep the job site safe, Schnell says.

What will happen if a worker fails?

“It will probably be something along the lines of, ‘Go home, we’ll see you tomorrow.’ … If you had repeated fails that’s no different than an employee who keeps calling in sick and you can’t depend on that employee. That would lead to a conversation.”

Schnell says his managers like the test, as there was no sound way to test for fatigue before, and testing for marijuana was also becoming problematic.

“It’s a pretty cool technology. I’m amazed there aren’t a million of them out there right now because we go to so many presentations where lawyers are saying, ‘You know what? There’s no way to properly test for marijuana and whether someone is on it.’ Yeah, actually, there is.”

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